Editor's Note: The following excerpt is derived from an engagement of Dr. Leny Mendoza Strobel's book "Glimpses: A Poetic Memoir" originally published in the November 2019 edition of The Halo-Halo Review.
"Over the last few years, you’ve expressed anticipation of retirement: walking away from the demands of an academic life. In your social media posts, it’s apparent that you find absolute joy in embodying kapwa: exchanging ideas with your Filipino American students, inviting them to dig deeper into their wonderings about and wanderings into decoloniality.
"Your scholarship and writing have always been deeply cathartic. Through poetry revealed in Glimpses, we learn of your personal tragedies, loves lost, longing for the homeland, and attempts at finding peace by staying in place. Yours is the kind of prose that lingers long after the page has turned: your voice is painfully real, haunting. It’s with this voice that you’ve liberated the language of decolonization and re-indigenization among many truth-seekers. You dreamt of and breathed life into the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS), inspiring an ever-growing community of people from the global Filipino diaspora to dream and imagine a movement of decolonizing kababayans, eager to keep alive our ancestral languages, songs, stories and ways of being and belonging to each other, fates interlinked with our kapwa-tao.
"You created CfBS as a community of inquiry, and because of this, we are all your humble students. Through your reflections and actions, you provoke us all to take our decolonizing practices outside the realm of the personal. In the age of social media, this means elevating praxis to a level of honesty and authenticity in an effort to transcend the performative, the prideful, to 'balance grief with gratitude.'"
Read more on The Halo-Halo Review
"Over the last few years, you’ve expressed anticipation of retirement: walking away from the demands of an academic life. In your social media posts, it’s apparent that you find absolute joy in embodying kapwa: exchanging ideas with your Filipino American students, inviting them to dig deeper into their wonderings about and wanderings into decoloniality.
"Your scholarship and writing have always been deeply cathartic. Through poetry revealed in Glimpses, we learn of your personal tragedies, loves lost, longing for the homeland, and attempts at finding peace by staying in place. Yours is the kind of prose that lingers long after the page has turned: your voice is painfully real, haunting. It’s with this voice that you’ve liberated the language of decolonization and re-indigenization among many truth-seekers. You dreamt of and breathed life into the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS), inspiring an ever-growing community of people from the global Filipino diaspora to dream and imagine a movement of decolonizing kababayans, eager to keep alive our ancestral languages, songs, stories and ways of being and belonging to each other, fates interlinked with our kapwa-tao.
"You created CfBS as a community of inquiry, and because of this, we are all your humble students. Through your reflections and actions, you provoke us all to take our decolonizing practices outside the realm of the personal. In the age of social media, this means elevating praxis to a level of honesty and authenticity in an effort to transcend the performative, the prideful, to 'balance grief with gratitude.'"
Read more on The Halo-Halo Review